With the advent of high-density data centers and high-bandwidth networking, it is becoming increasingly desirable to provide services “in a cloud.” This means that software is delivered to users as a service (referred to as Software as a Service “Saas”) and the platform that the software executes on over the network is delievered as a service (referred to as Platform as a Service “PaaS”).
Both SaaS and PaaS provide for computing and storage within “a cloud” where a user is not aware of the actual processing location or storage location of their service that processes over the network on that user's behalf.
Yet, while the actual location that a user's service processes is not particular interesting to the user and is in fact beneficially transparent to the user via the network cloud, the security associated with the location is a grave user concern. That is, it is critically important that the user know that any site over the network that processes the user's service conforms to certain guidelines and security restrictions so as to safeguard confidential data and ensure the integrity of the user's service when processing within the network cloud.
As a result, cloud discovery is not really an automated process for the user as it should be. This is so, because the user often has to know and has to certify specific locations within the network cloud before the user is comfortable with letting the user's service process from those network locations.
So, the technology (SaaS and PaaS) that was intended to be a huge leap forward in modern computing has in fact become a large manual administrative process, which actually impedes many of the benefits that are associated with SaaS and PaaS. Essentially, enterprises now find themselves establishing departments and staff that are solely dedicated to finding secure network locations for their applications.
Accordingly, improved techniques for automatically discovering and certifying application platforms are desirable.